NEW DELHI—India, which was accused last week of undermining the global fight against polio, vowed on Tuesday to eliminate the disease by 2007.
The World Health Organization says a polio outbreak in India this year is threatening other countries, and accuses it of "exporting" the disease to four nations in South Asia and Africa which had previously been declared "polio-free."
But India's Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said the government "intends to eliminate polio from the country by 2007," according to a statement.
The statement gave few details of how this would be achieved, except to say that Ramadoss would travel to the worst-affected state of Uttar Pradesh in the north of the country on Oct. 16 to meet field workers conducting an immunization campaign.
Polio affects the nervous system and is transmitted through feces. It can paralyze a child for life within hours. India has reported 283 cases so far this year, more than four times the 66 recorded through 2005. Ninety percent of the cases came from densely populated and unhygienic towns and villages of India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.
Tackling the virus there has become key to global anti-polio efforts, experts say.
Ramadoss said the government would launch a pilot project to administer the Injectable Polio Virus in parts of Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bihar, instead of oral polio drops. Experts say tens of thousands of children in Uttar Pradesh were missed by state health workers over the past year during rounds of immunization, leading to a resurgence of the virus.
In 1998, the WHO launched a global initiative to stamp out polio by 2005. But the disease remains endemic in four countries —India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Uttar Pradesh strain of the virus has also traveled to Bangladesh, Nepal, Angola and Namibia, four nations that had been free of polio, the WHO says.
The polio virus grows in the intestines for up to six weeks and is excreted from the body after that. This allows a person traveling abroad to spread the virus through fecal matter.
Millions of children in Uttar Pradesh live in poor sanitary conditions in neighborhoods where diarrhea is common.
Another hurdle facing officials in the state of 170 million people, with a large Muslim minority, are rumors that polio drops are part of a Western ploy to make Muslim children sterile.
India used to have tens of thousands of cases until the 1980s but a concerted vaccination program from the mid-1990s cut the number of cases to 134 in 2004 and 66 last year.
Feeds